Lorraine Bahrey's son Tyler Bahrey, a pipeline labourer with W. Pidhirney Welding Ltd., was killed when he was struck and crushed by a 570-kilogram pipe after it came off a trailer 70 kilometres northeast of Grande Cache, Alberta August 21, 2005.Stuart Gradon
/ Calgary Herald

This is a page from the Workplace Health and Safety Fatality Report for the death of Tyler Bahrey who was killed in August 2005. He died after pipe rolled off a trailer.Handout
/ Alberta Employement and Immigration

Lynn Cadrain's son Dustin Cadrain, with W. Pidhirney Welding Ltd, was killed when he was underneath a side boom, rigging up equipment to monitor a pipe for imperfections, when the boom fell and pinned him between the boom and the pipe 130 kilometres west of Drayton Valley, Alberta March 8, 2004. The photo was taken near Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, March 9, 2010.Stuart Gradon
/ Calgary Herald

Lynn Cadrain's son Dustin Cadrain, with W. Pidhirney Welding Ltd, was killed when he was underneath a side boom, rigging up equipment to monitor a pipe for imperfections, when the boom fell and pinned him between the boom and the pipe 130 kilometres west of Drayton Valley, Alberta March 8, 2004.Stuart Gradon
/ Calgary Herald

Richard Boughner, right, and his children in the summer of 2008.Courtesy
/ Charmayne Chisholm

Jacques Richard and Helene Roy, parents of Louis-Olivier Richard, pose behind a framed picture of their deceased son in their Cap-Rouge house, just West of Quebec City, May 18, 2010. Louis-Olivier is one of the three young Pidhirney workers who died in 2004 and 2005.Francis Vachon
/ Calgary Herald

Six years to the day she began planning her son’s funeral, justice remains elusive.

She’s not alone.

“It is pure hell. It is. And I don’t think it’s a hell that will ever totally go away,” she says, fighting back tears in her home, a day after the anniversary of Dustin’s death.

“It’s like a wave. It comes in waves, and I think it always will. It changes you fundamentally to the core.”

WHEN WORKERS PERISH

Every year in Alberta more people die from work than by murder.

Workers here are more likely to lose their lives for a paycheque than almost anywhere else in the country.

Nine out of every 100,000 employees were killed in 2008 compared with a low of four in New Brunswick. Only Newfoundland had a worse worker fatality rate.

During last decade’s frenzied economic boom, when businesses raced with activity, worker fatalities climbed to a 26-year high.

In 2008, before the economy soured, 166 people perished — one worker buried nearly every other day.

Despite this grim toll, Alberta is the least likely province to penalize safety offenders, a Herald investigation reveals, even though it has the second-most Crown prosecutors dedicated to occupational offences.

On paper, workplace safety offenders can be sent to prison. In practice, no one in Alberta has been jailed for causing a worker’s death.

In April, Alberta’s auditor general rapped the Stelmach government for failing to crack down on companies repeatedly breaking safety laws.

Instead of adequately enforcing its own rules, Alberta Employment and Immigration largely focuses on educating and collaborating with businesses, including those with injury rates significantly higher than the provincial average, the government watchdog found.

These high-risk employers represent a small fraction of Alberta companies, but Auditor General Merwan Saher warns that their workers are being exposed to potentially deadly dangers, such as toxic chemicals and explosions.

“The purpose of the rules is to minimize the risk of injury or death,” Saher says. “Without enforcement, workers are unnecessarily exposed to risks.”

The Herald’s year-long examination uncovered other deep-rooted problems with the enforcement of safety laws and protection of Alberta’s nearly two million workers.

After being denied access through freedom-of-information legislation to a list of Alberta’s worst workplace safety performers, the Herald undertook an analysis of how — and why — people died on the job in the past seven years. (Deaths involving long-term occupational diseases and traffic crashes on public roads were excluded as none of the fatality reports are public.)

A starting point of 2003 was chosen because that’s when a new era of workplace safety was supposed to arrive.

At the time, the Klein government pledged to hold flagrant offenders accountable in the courts and to name companies with poor safety records.

It appeared occupational inspectors would finally be given the power to issue on-the-spot fines for violations, just like traffic sheriffs, bylaw officers and wildlife officials.

These promises have gone largely unfulfilled.

These days, nearly five-times more money is doled out for insurance rebates to Alberta companies with government-endorsed safety certificates ($70 million in 2009) than is spent inspecting job sites and enforcing occupational safety laws ($15 million in 2009-10).

These safety rebates are available to companies with worker fatalities, even those with multiple deaths.

For its analysis, the Herald reviewed all available government workplace fatality reports since 2003, poring over more than 3,000 pages of documents in 171 deaths. The information was logged in a database to determine how often safety infractions were discovered and how many cases were taken to court.

This study of people killed at work — including employees burned in oil rig fires, mangled on assembly lines and crushed by steel tanks — shows investigators uncovered safety violations or problems in three-quarters of the deaths.

Yet, only a third of these cases were taken to court, with safety charges prosecuted to a verdict. In a dozen fatalities, charges were initially laid but later withdrawn.

In all, 85 families have seen no one held responsible for their loved one’s death, despite government investigators identifying workplace safety infractions or problems.

These fatalities include:

n Tuan Vu, 65, who worked at a mushroom farm near the town of Nanton. In April 2007, Vu’s clothing became caught in the gear teeth of a moving conveyor. He was pulled into the machine and crushed. Government investigators found the mushroom tray line conveyor lacked safeguards and a warning alarm to protect workers. Training records were also absent at Tiger Mushroom Farm. No safety charges were laid.

n Rock Hard Contractors put employee John Petraccione, 45, in a grader with faulty brakes. The owner of the company “was aware that the grader had braking mechanical defects prior to the incident,” a government probe uncovered.

When the grader began careening down an Edmonton hill in July 2005, Petraccione tried to bail, but was caught underneath the machine and dragged about six metres into a ravine. Four safety charges were laid, but later stayed.

n Then there’s the gruesome death of 22-year-old Colton Stoley.

At a gravel pit near Smoky Lake in northern Alberta, Stoley was caught between a rock crusher and its pulley while doing routine maintenance on moving conveyor belts in May 2007. His clothing was found wrapped around the pulley and his blue hard hat was discovered lodged in the massive machine.

A government investigation found his employer, Associated Aggregates, didn’t train him properly and allowed him and other workers to adjust conveyor belts while they were running, which was against the manufacturer’s directions.

When Stoley died, his grieving brother — who was working with him at the gravel pit — flew into a rage, breaking equipment and scuffling with Mounties.

While he was convicted of several criminal offences for his actions that day and ordered to pay Associated Aggregates nearly $16,000 for the damage he caused, the company did not face a single safety charge in Stoley’s death.

Not a penny in penalties was paid in these three cases or 82 other deaths linked to workplace safety problems.

Today, many families are wondering why.

Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk, whose department is responsible for enforcing job safety rules, wouldn’t weigh in on whether Alberta should take more safety offenders to court.

He notes workplace investigators act like police officers, providing information on fatalities to Crown prosecutors, who then make the final decision.

“Prosecution definitely is an important tool, but I have to question: Is it the most effective way of using resources, which includes dollars and staff time?” the minister says.

“I know that prosecutions usually tend to be high profile, but my goal is not to gain profile. It’s to gain effects at work sites.”

However, several former government occupational investigators tell a different story.

The one-time civil servants, who probed workplace deaths across Alberta, contend the province lacks the will to ramp up enforcement and penalize more businesses that break rules.

These former investigators told the Herald they were vexed by the number of times they uncovered safety violations, only to have their supervisors refuse to advocate for court action or the Crown decide against charges.

“From an investigator’s perspective, you had a file that you thought for sure was a slam dunk and they would drop it,” says Karen Kenny, a government safety officer from 1998 to 2006.

“It was hugely frustrating, and I know it was frustrating for the families because a lot of the times we would get no feedback from (Alberta) Justice,” she adds.

“The families had nowhere to go.”

TRAGEDY STRIKES, 2004

The day Dustin Cadrain died should have been a joyous homecoming for his mother Lynn.

After spending two months in an Edmonton hospital recovering from a double organ transplant to replace her kidney and pancreas, Cadrain was well enough to leave.

On March 8, 2004, her husband Hawkeye picked her up to head back to their ranch on the outskirts of Leslieville, west of Red Deer.

His cellphone rang about two hours later, as they pulled into their driveway.

Their 21-year-old son had been injured at a gas well west of Drayton Valley. An air ambulance was on its way, Hawkeye was told.

About 30 minutes later, the phone rang again: Dustin was dead.

He was a country boy at heart. Dustin raised cattle as a kid and recited cowboy poetry from memory. During the summers he guided hunters and tourists on horse trail rides. In the winters he usually worked in the oilpatch, following in his father’s footsteps.

Dustin had been away from home that March, living at a work camp in a remote wooded region about 130 kilometres west of Drayton Valley.

A labourer with W. Pidhirney Welding, he was part of a crew hired by Husky Energy to install a six-kilometre gas pipeline.

Construction was nearly complete that day when tragedy struck. After collecting skids and tubs, Dustin helped his co-workers check a section of pipe for imperfections before it was buried in the ground.

First, the pipe had to be fitted into a cradle and raised by a sideboom — a long steel arm connected to a dozer and used for lifting.

Standing underneath the raised boom, Dustin was about to hook the cradle to a cable, when the five-metre-long sideboom collapsed on him.

It weighed about four-times more than he did. Sandwiched between the boom and the gas pipe, Dustin was dead by the time emergency workers reached the remote site.

The medical examiner determined he died of “blunt chest trauma.”

Dustin shouldn’t have been under the boom. It was a dangerous place to be, provincial workplace investigators probing his death concluded.

Yet, his employer trained him to go under the boom to hook up equipment; the unsafe practice was common at W. Pidhirney Welding, investigators noted in their report.

Four safety violations were cited in Dustin’s death.

Three were against W. Pidhirney Welding, focusing on the company’s failure to make sure its employees didn’t work under sidebooms or suspended loads that could fall.

Szmanek Mechanical, hired by Pidhirney to maintain equipment at the work site, was flagged for one safety infraction. Investigators contended the one-man company didn’t properly tighten wire-rope clips on the boom line, contributing to the boom’s sudden collapse.

The case was forwarded to Crown prosecutors. Not all workplace deaths are.

Cases are generally sent for legal review when government investigators find evidence an employer or worker knowingly and seriously contravened safety rules, or should have known conditions were unsafe.

The ultimate decision on charges, however, rests solely with prosecutors.

To this day, Lynn Cadrain doesn’t understand why not a single charge was laid in her son’s death.

“For justice alone, something should have been done because there was definite fault,” she says angrily.

“Nobody was ever held accountable.”

PROMISES OF CHANGE

Scores of families of fallen workers feel like the Cadrains — that Alberta’s justice system let them down.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be under the province’s new era of job safety.

When workplace legislation was overhauled in late 2002, many of the government’s occupational safety officers expected prosecutions would ramp up sharply.

Their minister, Conservative MLA Clint Dunford, told them so himself.

“We’re here to back you up. If you feel you’ve got a case, then you go with it,” he recalls telling them.

Dunford, who oversaw the department from 1999 to 2004, spearheaded a drive to improve worker safety after several events propelled him to act.

Early in his tenure, executives from some of Alberta’s most prominent energy companies arranged to meet with him to talk about job safety. They were worried.

According to statistics from members in the group who worked around the globe, the injury rate for Alberta construction workers was reportedly one of the worst among developed countries.

Dunford didn’t believe them at first, but when the minister started to dig, he realized a safety revolution was needed.

“There was a culture out there that needed to be changed,” Dunford now says.“We set about to do that.”

They included boosting penalties, strengthening enforcement and publicly naming companies with poor safety records. The task force also encouraged the province to consider granting safety inspectors the authority to issue fines.

Many recommendations were enshrined in legislation in December 2002.

A new tone was set.

Court fines were hiked significantly to among the highest in Canada. The maximum penalty for a first offence increased to $500,000 from $150,000. An offender could also be sentenced to six months in jail. The maximum for a second offence was set at $1 million and up to a year in prison.

In speech after speech, Dunford warned employers to wake up. If someone was responsible for a worker’s death, there would be consequences, he pledged.

“I am fed up with excuses about ‘accidents.’ These are not accidents. They are preventable incidents, and we are going to do more in Alberta to prevent them,” he told an Alberta Congress Board conference in 2002.

Soon, though, circumstances changed.

When Dunford was moved to another cabinet post in 2004, the political will to take on offenders receded, several former government investigators say.

“Things were going backwards instead of forwards and the commitment they made originally was no longer there,” says John MacDonald, an officer from 2001 to 2004.

Dunford’s successor, longtime Tory MLA Mike Cardinal, who’s now retired, declined to answer questions about his tenure or why he shelved two key initiatives — identifying Alberta’s worst safety performers and giving occupational officers the authority to fine offenders as in several other provinces. Former premier Ralph Klein also declined to comment.

While workplace prosecutions have increased from the cost-cutting 1990s, Alberta still prosecutes far less than it did 25 years ago.

It’s also the least-likely province to penalize safety offenders.

From 1985 to 1988, Alberta prosecutions averaged 39 yearly, according to York University labour law expert Eric Tucker in a national review of workplace safety programs.

That figure dropped to just two cases a year in the late 1990s, but has jumped to an average of 12 annually since 2003.

Across Canada, provinces have different systems for penalizing workplace safety offenders.

Ontario and Quebec are among five provinces that now issue fines through the courts or their workplace safety departments, similar to tickets meted out by police.

Others, including Alberta and Saskatchewan, only use the courts to penalize serious safety offenders.

Among provinces that only pursued safety offenders through legal action in 2008, Alberta’s prosecution rate was the lowest, a Herald analysis shows.

British Columbia mainly doles out administrative fines for safety violations instead of using the legal system. While that province didn’t prosecute a single workplace offence in 2009, it issued 211 penalties against 190 employers.

In Saskatchewan, 11 prosecutions led to convictions last fiscal year, compared with nine in Alberta. Saskatchewan, though, has about 1.5 million fewer workers and reported 84 fewer deaths in 2009.

However, Alberta’s average fines are greater than either of its neighbours.

Today, Dunford is surprised prosecutions haven’t ramped up further.

“We had really pumped up the legal focus to go along with the increased fines,” says Dunford, who retired from politics in 2008.

“It didn’t make sense to me to increase the fines and add the flexibility to judges and then it wasn’t going to be used.”

DEADLY TIMES, 2005

News travels fast in a small town.

In August 2005, almost a year-and-a-half after her son died, Lynn Cadrain heard another young W. Pidhirney Welding employee was killed on the job.

She angrily picked up the phone and called the firm.

“What the hell? Did you guys learn nothing?” she recalls asking a company safety official.

He told her the oilfield service outfit learned much from her son’s death and safety practices had changed.

“Well, apparently not enough,” she replied bitterly.

In Leslieville, the oilfield service company founded by Wayne Pidhirney had grown rapidly during last decade’s economic surge.

At times, it struggled to find competent sideboom operators, government safety documents show.

In late 2004, several months after the first death, the company pulled one worker from operating a sideboom after another was injured. The firm also faced challenges with training and high staff turnover, a December 2004 provincial safety report notes.

Both company owner Wayne Pidhirney and safety manager Jeff Clarke declined to be interviewed for this story. The company sent a letter, instead, noting it has devoted a lot of energy to refining its safety program.

“We continue to re-evaluate our systems, training and processes on an ongoing basis,” Clarke says in the letter.

“We know we can never become complacent about safety, and we know we must always seek to go beyond the requirements of the regulations to protect our employees.”

Yet, Alberta’s fast times were taking a deadly toll.

The next victim to fall was Tyler Bahrey.

Like Dustin Cadrain, Tyler was a small-town Alberta boy.

He grew up in Bawlf, a farming village of 375 people southeast of Camrose.

Early in his adult years, Tyler struggled with drug addiction and drinking, but seemed to have turned a page. In the months before his death, the 26-year-old labourer with a boyish smile had a job he liked and a steady paycheque.

“He was just starting to get his life together,” says his mother, Lorraine Bahrey.

Tyler had been with W. Pidhirney Welding for less than four months when he was killed on Aug. 21, 2005, at a gas well site about 70 kilometres northeast of Grande Cache.

As in Dustin Cadrain’s death the year earlier, a sideboom played a role in the fatality.

That August day, Tyler was part of a nine-person Pidhirney crew hired by petroleum producer Encana Corp. to help build a natural gas pipeline.

Junior man on the job, he was putting away pipeline straps around 3:30 p.m. when the sideboom operator started his machine, backing up the tractor so the steel arm was over a flat-deck trailer loaded with pipes.

As the sideboom moved, its rigging snagged on a heavy pipe.

A supervisor signalled for the boom to stop, but the operator didn’t notice.

A pipe weighing about seven-times more than Tyler fell off the trailer and knocked him to the ground.

It took three co-workers to lift the 571-kilogram pipe off him.

He was declared dead at the scene, dying of “multiple blunt trauma,” the medical examiner reported.

In the months that followed, government fatality investigators uncovered multiple safety violations.

They found several members of the nine-person crew weren’t properly trained to do their job.

They noted W. Pidhirney Welding couldn’t prove Tyler and a supervisor were fully competent to perform their duties.

The sideboom operator wasn’t trained on how to safely use the machine, the investigators added.

Tyler’s mother learned of his death through a phone call from company owner Wayne Pidhirney.

Grabbing a piece of paper and pen, she struggled to write down what he was saying.

Her hand began to shake.

“When he told me that he did not survive, I totally fell apart,” Bahrey says solemnly.

FRICTION IN THE SYSTEM

The years following Clint Dunford’s departure from the Employment Department saw a change in the government’s attitude toward enforcing safety laws.

The shift reverberated directly on the front lines.

Some former provincial workplace investigators say friction developed with Crown prosecutors at times, as battles waged over laying charges. Other times, the investigators’ supervisors were an obstacle.

“I had some pretty real arguments with my supervisor in Calgary over whether (cases) were going to court or not,” recalls former investigator Tom Hailwood, who worked for the province for 25 years before retiring in 2007.

“Unless you hit people in the pocketbook, they’re not going to listen, particularly during boom times, when there’s so much money to be made.”

The last case that former investigator John MacDonald worked on still frustrates him. He believes charges were warranted, but they were never laid.

The victim was Jordan Roppel. The teenager was struck dead six years ago by a pickup truck’s broken metal ball hitch at Innicor Subsurface Technologies’ plant in Standard, east of Calgary.

MacDonald was one of two government investigators on the case. The pair found Innicor workers and managers routinely used a pickup to pull a forklift out the mud, even though the truck’s ball hitch wasn’t designed to handle the forklift’s weight.

“That one should have been prosecuted,” MacDonald says. “This is something they did all the time.”

Innicor Subsurface Technologies declined to comment on Roppel’s death because the company has changed ownership.

MacDonald, now a private safety consultant, contends Alberta’s low frequency of prosecutions is having a direct impact on safety.

“There are too many employers out there that just take advantage of the fact that nothing bad is really, really going to happen to them,” he says.

The head of workplace safety prosecutions, Crown attorney Brian Caruk, takes a different view.

Caruk declined to do an interview for this article or talk about specific deaths.

But answering questions via e-mail, he noted prosecutors follow a two-fold test when examining whether to lay charges: is a prosecution in the public interest and is there a reasonable likelihood of conviction?

Given these guidelines, Caruk wrote, “I do not see how we could be prosecuting more fatality cases.

“When one takes into consideration the penalties levied by Alberta courts, particularly in fatality cases, it is at least arguable that Alberta has one of the most aggressive and successful prosecution records in the country.”

An Alberta Employment document acknowledges only a small percentage of identified infractions are taken to court.

Prosecutions are generally reserved to deter other safety violators, not to punish offenders as in criminal law, it states.

“Prosecution is not necessarily the only option here,” Caruk said in an interview last year. “If there are no ongoing concerns, then the work site is safe — and what’s the real benefit of prosecuting every single thing?”

Alberta Employment and Immigration wouldn’t disclose how many cases it has forwarded to the Crown for legal review since 2003.

However, a Herald request for the details through the province’s freedom-of-information law yielded a partial list from Alberta Justice.

These documents show that of the 77 cases sent to the Crown because occupational investigators uncovered safety contraventions — almost always in the death or serious injury of a worker — no charges were laid in nearly half of the cases.

Of the 39 cases that were taken to court, 11 were eventually dropped.

Worker fatalities that weren’t prosecuted include:

* Rick James Petrie, 59. Working at the Wilderness RV Resort in Okotoks, Petrie was in the cab of a backhoe with the campground’s owner and another person as flooding hit southern Alberta in June 2005.

The owner drove the machine into swift-moving water and the backhoe flipped. No one was wearing life-jackets. Petrie drowned, swept away in the Sheep River.

Karen Kenny, a government investigator on the file, says she pushed for safety charges, but prosecutors dropped the case upon review.

“There was no hazard assessment considered, no safety precautions taken, no personal protective equipment, no emergency preparedness, basically nothing in place to protect themselves and workers,” recalls Kenny, who now works as a private safety investigator and consultant. Wilderness RV Resort closed in 2007.

* Michael Gauthier, 64, and a co-worker were cleaning the inside of a TransAlta Energy boiler at an oilsands site when the motor failed on their scaffold in 2006. The Clearwater Welding and Fabricating workers were trapped in the stiflingly hot boiler for more than an hour before rescue efforts finally succeeded. The heat stress killed Gauthier, while his co-worker survived.

Government investigators cited 16 safety violations in their report on Gauthier’s death, 14 directed at employer Clearwater Welding and two at TransAlta, the prime contractor. Among the problems, investigators found Clearwater did not have an effective rescue plan. No charges were laid.

Justice Minister Alison Redford understands not everyone is satisfied with the legal process, but says a Crown attorney’s role isn’t to prosecute on behalf of families’ wishes.

“We have to remember that the purpose of a prosecutor is to prosecute in the public interest, on behalf of the state,” she says.

Lukaszuk, employment minister since January, says he plans to talk to Redford about the possibility of boosting the number of prosecutors handling workplace safety cases — positions funded by his department.

However, he also notes the legal system isn’t the only avenue for improving job safety.

Two tools Lukaszuk is now studying are initiatives enshrined in legislation by Dunford eight years ago, but then ignored by government: on-the-spot fines and naming Alberta’s worst safety performers.

The minister recently formed two government-appointed committees to review the issues. The makeup of the groups, however, remains confidential, along with their full mandate and when they’re meeting.

“If there are ideas and there are mechanisms that will make our workplace safer, I’m open to looking at it,” Lukaszuk says.

One former industry official says it’s time the Alberta government got tougher.

Mike Joyce, a member of the government-appointed Occupational Health and Safety Council, hopes Lukaszuk refocuses the province’s attention on worker safety.

A former executive director of the Manufacturers’ Health and Safety Association, Joyce says there’s been little political will to take action in the past decade.

“To be very honest with you, the last three ministers have been duds. They’ve been terrible, no interest whatsoever on safety,” he says, speaking of Cardinal, Iris Evans and Hector Goudreau.

“When (Dunford) left, things stopped getting done.”

A THIRD DEATH

In a courtroom in Sherwood Park near Edmonton, three days before Christmas in 2008, Tyler Bahrey’s family sat shoulder to shoulder behind Crown prosecutor Brian Caruk.

Wayne Pidhirney was in the courtroom, too, along with his company’s safety manager.

More than three years had passed since Tyler was struck in August 2005 by a falling natural gas pipe.

Unlike the first death at the company, it faced safety charges this time.

W. Pidhirney Welding pleaded guilty to one offence, failing to ensure the health and safety of a worker. Four other safety charges were withdrawn.

In court, Caruk told a provincial court judge the company was reworking its practices when Tyler died — a sign that it was making some effort to comply with Alberta safety rules.

Tyler was the welding company’s second fatality. Less than four months after his death, another young employee perished.

Louis-Olivier Richard died operating a manlift on Dec. 4, 2005. He’d been on the job for only a month.

Born and raised near Quebec City, Louis-Olivier moved to Western Canada in 2004 to improve his English and work odd jobs.

At 21, Louis-Olivier had never toiled in the oilpatch. He was a trained pilot, but needed to make some extra cash in the fall of 2005. That led him to Leslieville and W. Pidhirney Welding.

On the day he died, Louis-Olivier was working at an oil and gas battery site, a collection point for petroleum owned by West Energy. W. Pidhirney Welding was contracted to install overhead pipelines at the site, about 10 kilometres northeast of Lodgepole in central Alberta.

The young labourer’s duties included operating a manlift, a machine designed to elevate workers in a basket.

No one witnessed how his head became trapped and crushed between the manlift’s basket and an outdoor overhead beam shortly before 5 p.m. He was dead before emergency responders reached the hospital.

A month after his funeral, Louis-Olivier’s father, Jacques Richard, sent a letter to the province’s lead investigator on the case questioning whether there was a link between the fatal incident and how many hours his son had worked.

Louis-Olivier’s final pay stub showed he clocked 14-hour shifts in each of the four days preceding his death, his father wrote.

He also wondered if his son had enough training to operate a manlift, especially in a confined space.

The young Quebecer had been working with the machine for about three weeks and his supervisors believed he was competent, government investigators found.

The province concluded Louis-Olivier’s death was the result of a mistake at the controls.

But the young worker’s family feels the investigation didn’t probe deep enough, considering the company’s track record of previous deaths.

W. Pidhirney Welding employed about 200 employees: Three were killed in just 21 months.

In the Sherwood Park courtroom on Dec. 22, 2008, the focus stayed on Tyler Bahrey, the company’s second worker to die.

“The degree of negligence, in this case, sir, the Crown characterizes as moderate,” Caruk told the court of the circumstances in Tyler’s death.

The company’s lawyer, David Myrol, highlighted the firm’s efforts to revamp its safety program.

Changes included hiring an engineer to make modifications to its sidebooms; appointing a full-time safety inspector and introducing a program to improve training of inexperienced workers; developing a new health and safety manual and a computer program to track safety training.

“Now one normally expects that kind of effort to be made after a serious workplace accident,” the defence lawyer told the judge.

“But I would submit to you, sir, that the preventive measures undertaken by this company are exemplary and should be held out for other companies in this province that have gone through a similar tragedy.”

W. Pidhirney Welding was fined $301,500.

Before sentencing wrapped up, the judge told the Bahrey family he was moved by their victim impact statements.

Saying he understood the depth of their anger, the judge hoped one day they could find some solace.

“Losing Tyler has been the most devastating experience I’ve ever had to face in my life,” his mother wrote the court.

“Part of me left with him.”

PICKING UP THE PIECES

Inside Lorraine Bahrey’s modest bungalow in Camrose, an image of her dead son stares back at her in black and white.

Around the frame of Tyler’s photo, a brief handwritten inscription is scrawled, comforting words from a poem:

“I’m there inside your heart. Right now I’m in a different place . . . and though we seem apart . . . I’m closer than I ever was . . . I’m there inside your heart.”

Like Dustin Cadrain’s mother, Bahrey has journeyed through the hell of losing her oldest son to a job.

Unlike many other families, however, she has a measure of resolution. Knowing her son’s employer was held accountable for Tyler’s death has helped her cope, she says, although it doesn’t bring him back.

Deep down inside, though, she wonders if the province could have done more.

“If they would have done something with this first kid, maybe Tyler would still be alive,” she laments.

And she doesn’t understand why justice in Alberta has escaped so many other families.

“They can’t just go around treating these young men out there . . . like numbers, like, ‘Oh wow, we can get another one tomorrow to replace him,’ ” Bahrey says.

“Well, maybe they can get another one tomorrow to replace him, but we can’t.”

WITH FILES FROM KELLY CRYDERMAN, CALGARY HERALD

RDALIESIO@THEHERALD.CANWEST.COM

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